Utter Bollocks — An Essay on Swearing

by Jim Hamlyn •
November 7, 2010

Some friends of mine are having difficulties with their five year old son who has started swearing whilst at his new school. They’ve tended not to discourage him from swearing at home and now they’re faced with the task of socialising him into a set of values which are somewhat different to their own but which are held by the social sphere into which their son is being initiated. It makes one wonder who’s actually being manipulated to conform the most: the child or his parents?

With children it’s often pointless to attempt to rationally explain the complexities of a mode of behaviour which we wish them to modify. Instead we tend to lay down rules and injunctions to control and encourage behaviours which we feel are appropriate to a particular context. We say “No, don’t do that” or “Stop it”, and when asked for an explanation we all too often say “Because I said so” or, if we’re not too distracted or stressed by the situation, we might work a little harder to come up with a shorthand explanation like “Because it’s bad” or “Because it’s naughty”. Whilst this is understandable, it’s often the case that such responses are simply inherited from our parents and other childhood figures of authority. We tend to accept these norms and when explanations are required the most expedient and conventional responses are easily to hand. How often, I wonder though, do we stop to consider the values and motivations behind these attitudes? For the most part the explanations we give aren’t really explanations at all: they’re descriptions of what we judge swearing to be, and they provide very little indication, if any, about the root of the issue. So, not only do our children miss out on the truth, but we ourselves have only the barest understanding of what we believe. If we’re pushed on this subject the most common response we’ll give is that swearwords are sexual in nature, and children should be protected from such things. But is this really anything more than a half-truth?

Swearing is perceived by many people as the result of poor upbringing by parents who, for whatever reason, are too busy, too unconcerned or too liberal to discourage their kids from such antisocial or ‘obscene’ behaviour. But already we can see a series of clear judgements underlying these responses. I’d like to suggest that it’s precisely this, ‘judgement’, rather than simply moral outrage, which is at the heart of our attitudes about swearing.

Swearing allows us to distinguish between members of different social groups and social levels in a very similar way to regional accents and slang. It’s a universal discriminative capacity which creates linguistic differentiation and provides clues as to the values, upbringing and social status of different individuals. The important thing to recognise here is that the conventional objection against swearing has relatively little to do with the explicit sexual content of expletives.

“A word becomes an insult, one would suppose, because it means something bad; but in practice it’s insult-value has little to do with its actual meaning.”

—George Orwell

The argument that children need to be protected from such things, neatly avoids the fact that the typical injunction against swearing contains a significant component of social differentiation and exclusion. As with all exclusionary practices, the uninitiated are either denied entry to the group, expelled, or forced to conform to the group’s dominant norms. The truth, which is easily missed here, is that the argument about the sexual content of swearwords is simply a convenient moralistic foil for these exclusionary and manipulative social practices. Indeed, it could be argued that these censorious attitudes are, in many ways, the very cause of the problems they seek to eradicate:

“Taboo topics tend to generate many slang expressions, and these have been conceptualized as functioning to resist oppressive norms that deny voice to certain groups of people and render some subjects unspeakable.”

—Virginia Braun and Celia Kitzinger

But this isn’t to suggest that all swearwords are entirely innocent or that the intentions behind their use are simply noble expressions of resistance against oppression. Many swearwords are forms of abuse, specifically designed to alienate and insult people by marking them out as different, inferior or abnormal, and we’re right not to tolerate such xenophobic and abusive attitudes. We all have our moral limits and many of these are shared across differing social groups and are crystallised in social taboos. But not only do these taboos tell us about where we set some of our most delicate moral limits, they also tell us about our collective fixations and anxieties. As with any group, these fixations and anxieties are frequently associated with what we regard as sacred, and by extension, profane — from whence we derive our conceptions of profanity.

Alongside this perception of language as a register of the sacred and profane resides the belief that words are more than simply utterances: words have the power to offend, to shock, to violate and to transgress. The well known phrase that ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me’ becomes, from this perspective, little more than a case of wishful thinking: words can, on the contrary, inflict severe and lasting psychological harm. But we still need to be careful around such arguments. For example, there’s a legal term sometimes known as the Hecklers Veto in which a group can effectively force the government to prevent an individual from exercising free expression by taking offence and threatening to riot. It’s the government’s duty in such cases to prevent a riot whilst granting all individuals free speech, so long of course, as this free speech isn’t acting with the singular intent to incite a riot.

“The rioters are the culpable parties, not the artist whose work unintentionally provoked them to violence.”

The vital issue here then, is the intent behind an utterance or expression rather than the offence taken. Inevitably, it’s not always a straightforward matter to determine the underlying intentions behind an utterance but it’s certainly preferable to allowing self professed offended parties to dominate or veto free expression.

“Much might be said on the impossibility of fixing where these supposed bounds are to be placed; for if the test be offence to those whose opinion is attacked, I think experience testifies that this offence is given whenever the attack is telling and powerful, and that every opponent who pushes them hard, and whom they find it difficult to answer, appears to them, if he shows any strong feeling on the subject, an intemperate opponent.”

—JS Mill

One of the principle complexities at the heart of our consideration of swearwords derives from the confusing lack of consistency in the ways that different groups, and even individuals within these groups, use expletives. This inconsistency is much less a consequence of the fluidity of linguistic meaning than a clear indication of the fact that swearing is primarily a form of social negotiation and exchange:

“swearing functions not only as a marker of (group) identity, but also as a means of negotiating and actively constituting that identity.”

—Karyn Stapleton

Once again, we find that the literal meaning of expletives tends to be secondary to the communicative dynamic which such words create. Swearing reinforces relationships or quite literally comes between them, and differing social groups define their linguistic boundaries in a variety of nuanced and complex ways in order to negotiate and express their collective values, often to the point of inventing their own euphemisms or, on occasion, entirely new lexicons.

This tendency for taboo subjects to stratify into distinct lexicons was noted by the British author CS Lewis who pointed out that when discussing sex we are “forced to choose between the language of the nursery, the gutter and the anatomy class.” This observation illustrates how each lexicon is closely associated with a particular contextual use. Moreover, when we encounter terms from a particular lexicon outside their familiar setting they often seem incongruous, if not completely absurd. For example, you’re unlikely to say in the heat of passion “let’s have sexual intercourse”, nor are you likely to say to a doctor “I have an uncomfortable pain in my arsehole”, though, interestingly, such things are becoming more common (see here).

When I first began thinking about the issues of swearing I was tempted to consider the exclusion of children from the use of ‘adult’ language to be a case of irrational inconsistent disingenuousness on the part of adults. Willy, Penis and Prick name exactly the same thing after all, so why might we wish to prevent children from using these different associated lexicons freely? I can see two possible reasons. The first is related to the contextual dependency of different lexicons and the subtlety with which individuals use swearing to test, negotiate with and/or to gain entry to different groups:

“Speakers who use taboo language successfully (i.e., they do not seem to Offend their listeners) are often attuned to the situation in which they are speaking.”

—Robin-Eliece Mercury

It has been found that the urge to swear originates at a fundamental neurological level and is therefore an unusually instinctive and pre-linguistic form of expression which has been identified even in primates. Despite these primitive origins, swearing has also been shown to involve sophisticated process of predictive modeling which subconsciously assesses potential audience response:

“Researchers point out that cursing is often an amalgam of raw, spontaneous feeling and targeted, gimlet-eyed cunning. When one person curses at another, they say, the curser rarely spews obscenities and insults at random, but rather will assess the object of his wrath, and adjust the content of the ‘uncontrollable’ outburst accordingly.”

—Natalie Angier

The higher-order forms of cognitive processing and sensitivity to nuance involved in the use of swearwords are specifically enabled, on a neurological level, by the functions of a well developed Pre-Frontal Cortex; a portion of the brain which only fully matures in late childhood. To expect children to understand, yet alone appropriately utilise such sophisticated, context dependent forms of language would surely be unrealistic and would undoubtedly to lead to error, confusion and misunderstanding in the use of forms of language to which many people are especially sensitive.

But there’s another, equally compelling reason why swearing might be thought to be a sensitive issue for children and this relates to children’s developing understanding of the meaning of privacy. As children’s language skills develop and they become more independent, it’s important for them to be able to function effectively within the moral culture that surrounds them. At this stage it becomes increasingly necessary for them to form conceptions of the personal and the private and their first encounters with these concepts are most likely to be through language and the taboos which are so deeply inscribed within it. The way adults frame and proscribe language through the use of different lexicons becomes an alert to children that there’s something curious about the things to which these words refer but also something mysterious, powerful and most of all threatening which they don’t yet quite understand. In a sense, it might be argued that taboos act like a form of protection, by raising awareness of social sensitivities and forcing parents to demarcate boundaries of acceptability. In many ways taboos functions exactly like subtle socially accepted versions of parents who say “You can’t do that because I said so”: they establish boundaries based upon authority and they leave explanations to be sought or invented by minds who, in so many respects, have other peoples ideas of innocence foisted upon them.

Subscribe

Against Branding — Design and Conflict on Design Observer raises an interesting question but is not argued well. With his critique of Amnesty International posters, his issue appears to be consistency or homogeneity of the looks. He says, “While I’m not claiming that there’s no room for consistency in visual identity design, isn’t the uncritical application of any communications methodology asking for trouble?”

If consistency per se is not the problem, he needs to explain why the rebranded versions are “uncritical.” He fails to explain the relationship between consistency and lack of critical analysis. They are not necessarily related. As a branding strategy, it’s possible to deliberately employ inconsistency while being uncritical, and it’s also possible to be consistent while being critical.

His bigger issue appears to be the socio-economic class. Unfortunately here too, he doesn’t explain how exactly branding contributes or perpetuates the problem. The mechanism is not at all clear in his arguments.

For instance, he uses São Paulo as proof that “removing these signs helped reveal the stark poverty of the favelas (urban slums).” But how? He doesn’t explain. In fact, his claim goes counter to his quoting of Barthes. Barthes’ point isn’t that “myths” veil or hide “class division”, but that they normalize it. That is, manipulative branding or advertising can turn a problem into an identity to be embraced. It does not veil or hide “the stark poverty”; it presents the poverty ubiquitously in order to normalize it. It does the opposite of veiling.

In this sense, the aspect of Donald Trump’s branding that needs a critical analysis is not his vodka but his use of baseball caps during the presidential campaign. Baseball cap is a symbol of the rural working class. The 1-percenters like Trump do not wear baseball caps. It was part of the effort to turn the socio-economic plight into an identity, to normalize the income inequality. This is where Barthes’ analysis of myth becomes relevant.

Between the branding strategies used by Trump and Clinton, the latter was decidedly more “corporate.” Take a look at Trump’s baseball cap; it’s decidedly un-corporate. It’s set in a generic serif font and is barely designed. But I would bet that it was a strategic decision NOT to design it well, to keep it looking lowbrow. Clinton’s branding, designed by Pentagram’s Michael Bierut, was much more corporate, but its sophistication is also a signifier for the urban elitism that the rural working class detests. Trump’s campaign understood this, and Clinton’s didn’t. In one interview I saw, Michael Moore said he suggested making baseball caps to Clinton’s campaign early on but they ridiculed his idea. He said he realized how out of touch they were with the rural working class then.

What this tells us is that whether your branding campaign looks consistent and corporate has nothing to do with whether you are being critical. Clinton’s campaign was out of touch with the people they claim to fight for. If they are not even aware of their plights, how could they be critical in the first place? Trump’s campaign was at least in touch with their people, and knew how to exploit it using deliberately unsophisticated, un-corporate branding strategies.

For most people, “Daily Affirmation with Stuart Smalley” is what Facebook is. It’s a system to receive daily affirmations, to confirm their own biases, to congratulate one another. It’s not a platform where you challenge the ideas of others and others challenge yours. It’s not a peer review system.

Given what we have learned since the election, I’m now willing to say that Trump is preferable to Clinton (as Zizek declared before the election). It’s a high cost but it’s better than eight more years of oppressing the rural working class and suppressing their anger and despair. The outcome of that after eight more years would have been a lot worse.

I saw the problem before the election but had no clue how bad it was. When I wrote the articles explaining why the rural working class would vote for Trump, I was shocked by the reactions I received from my friends. They did not see it at all. Not only that; they became angry at me for writing them. In other words, the Left’s unawareness of the problem was not just lack of curiosity or a result of living in a bubble; it was ideological ignorance. That is, they felt they SHOULD ignore the plight of the rural working class. It was an ideological war against the rural values. Clinton’s use of the word “deplorables” is reflective of this. Had Clinton been elected, this war, which the Left was dominating, would have continued for another eight years. The problem Richard Rorty saw in the 90s would have devasted the entire middle class by then, both rural and urban. It would have been everyone’s problem, except for the top 0.1%.

The key contributing factor, which was not often talked about in this election cycle, is the speed of the technological evolution. The reason why startups are so popular is because technology is super-effective and efficient in amassing the wealth for the very few. Its ability to “scale” the profit without raising the cost is almost infinite. The first group of people to see the consequences of this scary efficiency was the rural whites. Those in the lower class, I don’t think, saw the decline because they were already at the bottom, as low as anyone could go without dying.

The income disparity is the biggest problem we are seeing globally. All the other problems we are seeing, like racism and xenophobia, are merely the symptoms of this main problem. Fighting racism is like taking an aspirin to remove the symptoms of the illness without attending to the cause.

According to this study, corporate programs designed to reduce managerial bias through education like diversity training had an overall negative impact: a 7 percent decline in the odds for black women to get managerial positions and an 8 percent decline in the odds for black men.

If a well-meaning effort to combat racism can have a negative impact, what do you think verbally attacking your political opponents of being racists would do? Let’s think about this before we further contribute to racism.

The fact that virtually all entertainers of all colors and creeds support the Democrats tells us how in touch they are with the American ideals. The fact that they lost the election despite all their emotional power tells us how out of touch they are with the American reality.

This election inspired me to reach out to people with a greater diversity of values; religious, political, national, regional, educational, socio-economic, professional, etc.. Our culture has been too focused on diversity in terms of how we look and has neglected our inner differences. We let “diversity” become a mere buzzword. Because we cannot see our values, we’ve conveniently excused our prejudices.

Through the Internet, we are able to create highly customized bubbles of our own. Our Facebook timelines are great representations of them. Each of our timelines is a unique bubble that caters to our needs and desires. We can judge the people outside of our bubbles all we want without the risk of being judged by them. This isolation, comfort, and safety magnify our fears about the world outside of our bubbles. Our tolerance for different values has weakened to an alarming level.

In our modern societies, the fear and anger towards the other will likely grow over time because of these technologies.

The best way to overcome our fear is to know more about it. “Ignorance” is not lack of knowledge—we cannot know everything—but judging without the willingness to know.

Ignorance permeated both sides of the political spectrum in this election. Both sides feared one another, yet made little to no effort to know one another. They let themselves be so overwhelmed with the fear of the other that they just shut down, and made no effort to reach out to the other side.

The political scientist interviewed in this article did the right thing. For about a decade, she traveled back and forth to rural towns in order to understand “why they feel the way they feel, why they vote the way they vote.” This article was published on Election Day before the result came out, but I think Trump’s victory lends further credibility to her theory.

There is a vast divide between the rural USA and the urban USA. We no longer understand one another. Ugly bigotry actually exists on both sides. The liberals are lucky because there is no shameful term like “racism” to label their own version. The closest word is perhaps “elitism.”

I don’t know why the media endorses presidential candidates. Once you publicly declare your position, you would naturally start defending your position. Gradually everything you say will be positional. Positional debates are not constructive.

I’m not saying that the media should not have an “editorial” department; in fact, I believe they should. There are theories, hypotheses, and speculations that cannot be backed up by facts. I think this is the hole that bloggers filled. I noticed this during the financial crisis of 2008. Because the news media were limited to reporting what can be backed up by facts and avoid making speculations, I turned to bloggers for more relevant information and their expert interpretations of what was happening.

Theories, hypotheses, and speculations do not have to be positional. The media could make their best guesses at what Henry Paulson was thinking during the crisis, and they wouldn’t be taking any sides. It’s still value-neutral. They could debate about the potential impact of Trump’s immigration policies without making a value judgment, simply speculate what they think will happen.

Speculation is often looked at as a bad thing but we all need to speculate to some degree to prepare ourselves for the future, and the media play an important role in that. They cannot provide just facts. Their audience also need structural frameworks to make their own judgment. Facts alone are not useful unless the reader is an expert on the subject. It’s like supplying random ingredients without teaching them the basic skills of cooking. But they don’t need to tell the readers that lasagna is better than ziti. Endorsing a presidential candidate is as absurd as declaring which religion is the best.

If they are going to claim that they are unbiased and objective, they need to do a much better job at being unbiased. Otherwise, they need to declare themselves to be a biased media outlet and state their bias up-front. It’s the pretense that’s harmful. In this election, I think we witnessed how harmful it is. The media was completely out of touch with the half of this country and mislead the country.